nomarch-1.2 - Problems with RLE patent 4,586,027

[Matthew Grant <grantma@debian.org>]

Dear James,

Could you please withdraw the nomarch package from the main upload queue.  This thing belongs in non-free.

Sorry about this. I have tried to be careful. Who would have thought that such an obvious compression technique (Run Length Encoding - count number of bytes in a row of same value, store count and byte value) is covered by a software patent?  Due to only using LZW decompression and Huffman encoding, I thought that this thing was in the clear.  Instead 
I find compression technology has a big raft of software patents... 

See the compresion FAQ up at ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/compression-faq/ section 1 for the goods on it....

Could you please withdraw the nomarch package from the main upload queue.  This thing belongs in non-free.

I have just done some further investigation of the IP behind this thing, and the RLE decoding is covered by a Hitachi patent 4,586,027 (filed 08/07/84, granted 04/29/86) that is due to run out in July 2004 I believe.  

This also means that any virus scanning stuff will need to be put in the contrib section....

Best Regards 

On Thu, 2002-05-16 at 18:45, James Troup wrote:
> nomarch_1.2-1_i386.changes uploaded successfully to auric.debian.org
> along with the files:
>   nomarch_1.2-1.dsc
>   nomarch_1.2.orig.tar.gz
>   nomarch_1.2-1.diff.gz
>   nomarch_1.2-1_i386.deb
>
> Greetings,
>
> 	Your Debian queue daemon
>

-- 
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Matthew Grant	     /\	 ^/\^	grantma@anathoth.gen.nz      /~~~~\
A Linux Network Guy /~~\^/~~\_/~~~~~\_______/~~~~~~~~~~\____/******\
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